4,824 research outputs found
Inexact Convex Relaxations for AC Optimal Power Flow: Towards AC Feasibility
Convex relaxations of AC optimal power flow (AC-OPF) problems have attracted
significant interest as in several instances they provably yield the global
optimum to the original non-convex problem. If, however, the relaxation is
inexact, the obtained solution is not AC-feasible. The quality of the obtained
solution is essential for several practical applications of AC-OPF, but
detailed analyses are lacking in existing literature. This paper aims to cover
this gap. We provide an in-depth investigation of the solution characteristics
when convex relaxations are inexact, we assess the most promising AC
feasibility recovery methods for large-scale systems, and we propose two new
metrics that lead to a better understanding of the quality of the identified
solutions. We perform a comprehensive assessment on 96 different test cases,
ranging from 14 to 3120 buses, and we show the following: (i) Despite an
optimality gap of less than 1%, several test cases still exhibit substantial
distances to both AC feasibility and local optimality and the newly proposed
metrics characterize these deviations. (ii) Penalization methods fail to
recover an AC-feasible solution in 15 out of 45 cases, and using the proposed
metrics, we show that most failed test instances exhibit substantial distances
to both AC-feasibility and local optimality. For failed test instances with
small distances, we show how our proposed metrics inform a fine-tuning of
penalty weights to obtain AC-feasible solutions. (iii) The computational
benefits of warm-starting non-convex solvers have significant variation, but a
computational speedup exists in over 75% of the cases
Convex Global 3D Registration with Lagrangian Duality
The registration of 3D models by a Euclidean transformation is a fundamental task at the core of many application in computer vision. This problem is non-convex due to the presence of rotational constraints, making traditional local optimization methods prone to getting stuck in local minima. This paper addresses finding the globally optimal transformation in various 3D registration problems by a unified formulation that integrates common geometric registration modalities (namely point-to-point, point-to-line and point-to-plane). This formulation renders the optimization problem independent of both the number and nature of the correspondences.
The main novelty of our proposal is the introduction of a strengthened Lagrangian dual relaxation for this problem, which surpasses previous similar approaches [32] in effectiveness.
In fact, even though with no theoretical guarantees, exhaustive empirical evaluation in both synthetic and real experiments always resulted on a tight relaxation that allowed to recover a guaranteed globally optimal solution by exploiting duality theory.
Thus, our approach allows for effectively solving the 3D registration with global optimality guarantees while running at a fraction of the time for the state-of-the-art alternative [34], based on a more computationally intensive Branch and Bound method.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucĂa Tech
Convex Relaxations for Permutation Problems
Seriation seeks to reconstruct a linear order between variables using
unsorted, pairwise similarity information. It has direct applications in
archeology and shotgun gene sequencing for example. We write seriation as an
optimization problem by proving the equivalence between the seriation and
combinatorial 2-SUM problems on similarity matrices (2-SUM is a quadratic
minimization problem over permutations). The seriation problem can be solved
exactly by a spectral algorithm in the noiseless case and we derive several
convex relaxations for 2-SUM to improve the robustness of seriation solutions
in noisy settings. These convex relaxations also allow us to impose structural
constraints on the solution, hence solve semi-supervised seriation problems. We
derive new approximation bounds for some of these relaxations and present
numerical experiments on archeological data, Markov chains and DNA assembly
from shotgun gene sequencing data.Comment: Final journal version, a few typos and references fixe
On the local stability of semidefinite relaxations
We consider a parametric family of quadratically constrained quadratic
programs (QCQP) and their associated semidefinite programming (SDP)
relaxations. Given a nominal value of the parameter at which the SDP relaxation
is exact, we study conditions (and quantitative bounds) under which the
relaxation will continue to be exact as the parameter moves in a neighborhood
around the nominal value. Our framework captures a wide array of statistical
estimation problems including tensor principal component analysis, rotation
synchronization, orthogonal Procrustes, camera triangulation and resectioning,
essential matrix estimation, system identification, and approximate GCD. Our
results can also be used to analyze the stability of SOS relaxations of general
polynomial optimization problems.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figure
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